Near-eye display systems are becoming more common. Such near-eye display systems attempt to provide a three dimensional display to the user. In the prior art, displays rendering multiple focal planes utilized mechanical movement such as gears or liquid lenses. Such mechanisms are expensive, slow, and relatively fragile. Another prior art method of displaying multiple focal lengths uses multiple mirrors and lenses.
Such prior art solutions are some combination of large, expensive, and slow. Liquid lenses are expensive and slow, and prior art beam splitters are large. This makes them difficult to use, and not useful for size or cost constrained systems, particularly near-eye display systems.